Early humans may have interbred with chimps, leading to hybridisation before the two genetic lines fully split.

We can observe the traces of this complex history in the human genome today, says David Reich, a population geneticist at the Broad Institute and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Reich and his colleagues compared the genomes of humans, chimps and gorillas using a “molecular clock” to estimate how long ago the three groups diverged. The further back two species diverged, the more differences will have accumulated between their genome sequences.

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